Shutdowns

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It could be that you are hyperlexic, I am and most of the time I can read fast and understand what I read but when I'm close to or in somekind of overload I can't understand what I'm reading at all no matter how fast or slow I read even if I repeat every word 100 times over.

I had a major meltdown in august and I don't feel like I've fully recoverd from that one so I'm starting to get a bit worried that I'll never be as "present" socially as I was before it.




One day a month ago I couldn't understand a single word anybody said to me and I couldn't quite understand my own toughts either so I took a pen and paper and started writing on the first topic that came to mind that was how comunicating is different for me compared to most people and 2 hours later I became "conscious" again and I had written 5 pages that I myself didn't understand anything from but I showed it to my dad and he said that it was very well written so I showed it to my teatcher too and she wanted a copy and so did the other teatchers and my psyciatrist aswell. they said I described everything perfectly. And that was the first essey-like thing I've ever written. And I can't even read and understand it my self

It seems like there are short-term and longer-term versions of this. People describe the 'can't speak' experience in response to anxiety, threat, difficult people or environments/stimuli. When I get this, it lasts as long as the cause remains, plus some recovery time.

I also experienced a longer-lasting version that came with prolonged stress, exhaustion etc. It was like a physical shutdown of not being able to move easily. I just couldn't speak for long periods at a time, or it came out wrong, slurred, which was unsettling, my handwriting went & I couldn't form the written words I wanted to.
I couldn't read, watch TV & my 'go-to' escape route of my fantasy world was blocked. It was bad because the things that soothed or distracted me were the things I couldn't access.

I had to take the time to recover and gradually improved, so I hope you manage to find the time and space to do the same. If you can reduce as many of the stressors though that will help, every tiny bit helps when your system is overloaded -even if you don't understand what or why in every detail.

Good find - thanks!

It's not easy finding good descriptions of shutdowns. I'm glad that was out there.

Could've done with finding it a few years ago.

The more I read about them the more I'm convinced of their link with seizures.
I had both on the day I was planning to go to a gig the second night in a row. During that gig I did have a seizure. I felt the usual tingling/burning and felt electric shocks as my limbs would move of their own accord.
Usually I lose balance, slur speech (or lose it completely - one side of the mouth will be in capable of it) and not remember much of what happened around the time of a seizure. Oh and some pretty vivid visual hallucinations and loud voices in one ear.

Before that shutdowns were pretty much the same minus the limb jerking (the movement was more loose and controllable), the hallucination, tingling/ burning and I had so much lethargy for everything. A bit like depression I suppose but it did eventually fade.

But saying they last only 30 minutes and you have slow thinking the following days - that's just like seizure.

Don't mean to scare anyone. I only think that shutdowns are a type of autistic seizure. I've got the whole disorder, thank you very much Ritalin. But I find the similarities between the two very interesting.

I do too.

It seems like there are other conditions or symptoms associated with autism that resemble other conditions (like Anbuend's motor disorder that overlaps with autistic symptoms as well as Parkinson's).

It makes me think autism is a fairly complex condition, neurologically.

Speaking of slow thinking: I had a meltdown online a few months ago that left me feeling neurologically slow (and kind of punchy) for a few days after I had finally had my explosion. Fortunately, I didn't cause any drama with anyone, but the experience was still...well, typical, but I took note of it that time for some reason.

Heh. Yes indeed!

Depression seems to be a component of what I'm dealing with, though not the whole thing, either. The muted emotions thing sounds familiar. The times where I couldn't get any meaning out of what I was reading were often associated with feeling numbed-out/dissociated. That feeling is less there days, and the reading problems are less, but still there. Hrm.

As far as certain things getting harder, in my case it seems to working memory and executive functioning getting worse. From the handful of people I've seen/talked to (online) those sorts of cognitive losses/worsenings seem somewhat characteristic of this "burnout" thing.



That sounds exactly like it -- I can run my eyes past the words over & over but it will still feel/seem like reading a list of random words that don't mean anything when put next to each other. I've been told learned the alphabet from TV at a young age, but don't think I could read before I went to school. I'll have to ask my parents about that.



I've found when I have to push into the "burnout zone" that I don't seem to come all the back when it's over. More foggy, slower thinking, lower energy. That seems like another pattern with what I've seen people say about "autistic burnout." Many do seem to slowly recover, though. I find one upside is that it's harder to get as anxious as I used to, simply for the lack of energy.

All this reminds me of a line by Richard Pryor, where he said that MS was God's way to telling him to slow down. (Though, the world isn't iften helpful in allowing one to slow down.)

Thanks for the replies, folks.

Huh. I experience things very similar. I wonder at myself that I never thought much of these kinds of things until just recently. That is, I never thought to associate it with autism or anything else. It was just "me". I feel so clueless.

The selective mutism didn't seem to quite describe my experience exactly, so that quote is interesting. I am going to read that link as soon as I get a chance.

I don't feel dissociated or numb, which is the odd thing. My emotions are kind of available, although I feel like it's easier for me to get emotionally overwhelmed despite emotions feel muted. My depression just feels like it's not there, emotionally. My anxiety is reduced significantly as well.

Yes, working memory and executive function getting worse would describe it pretty well.



Yeah, it's not easy to even find a lot of information about these unless I guess you know the right book to read or the right part of the community to check or you're lucky enough to catch a digression that mentions it on another forum, or you randomly read a blog post that talks about it.

FINALLY something triggered a discussion of shutdown and I think I can describe it. 

For me a lot of things can be affected, and they can be anything from mild to severe. Some examples (be aware that some of these can occur in me naturally if I'm at the bottom of the cliff I climb to get to abilities, but can also be shutdowns from higher up the cliff -- there's still a subtle difference of quality of the experience because shutdown is inherently a violent process):

"Disappearing". Whatever happens when I'm disappeared, I have no memory of it. But I'm aware that it has happened. Unlike an absence seizure. 

Being cut off from all my senses. And my body (which I process as just one part of a huge external world). And time. And thought -- whether abstract, or sensory patterns, or sensory input. And memory. Well memory is obviously encoding at the time or I could not describe this. But I can't recall anything while this is happening. There must be something to be aware of though since otherwise I couldn't remember it either. So I guess I'll say that at that point I'm pure awareness, with no sensory experiences or thoughts. Just aware. During this, and during disappearing, people always swear I was physically present, but I have a hard time believing it. 

Being totally unable to move. 

Being totally unable to find my body. 

Having my senses cut out on me while retaining thought or memory or etc. 

Having memory entirely cut out (again, I'm speaking mostly of recall, not encoding, although encoding can have glitches as well). Such that every moment is separate from all others. A weird feeling. 

Being unable to remember or believe the existence of anything not immediately obvious to my senses. This means if I simply turn around my entire brain reels in shock like "AAAAAAAAA the world just disappeared and got replaced!" Turning around like that is usually excruciatingly painful as well. 

Vision does this weird thing. My friend describes it as everything turning into a bunch of individual pixels. I guess it may be the most extreme form of visual fragmentation or something. Makes vision totally useless but still present enough to be incredibly painful and overloading.  

Awareness of things around me visually and cognitively can drop down to the level of simple light and darkness. I remember in one shutdown I chased my shadow in circles for awhile with no awareness of what it was or why I was doing that. 

Thinking can become very rigid in a highly stereotypical autie sort of way. This is worse if I am trying hard to hold onto my thinking abilities while shutting down. I can get into horrible arguments where I make no sense at all, know I make no sense, and can't stop myself. It's terrible to watch myself getting progressively more irrational and not be able to do anything. I wish I could come up with a good example but I can't. If I can manage to stop trying to hang onto my cognitive abilities this stops. 

All possible effects of my movement disorder intensify. Trouble crossing visual boundary lines. Trouble moving through a different sort of boundary like from sitting to standing. Trouble switching from one movement to another. Trouble starting and stopping movement in general. Slowing down. Random frenetic movements. Freezing in the middle of things. These things all exist already but when shutdown is happening they only get worse. 

Being unable to get meaning out of any of my senses no matter how hard I try. 

Being unable to understand words no matter how hard I try. 

Being unable to use words no matter how hard I try.

Again, these have a more violent quality than simple inabilities. Instead of simply getting nowhere and being uncomfortable, I experience searing pain when I try these things. Also they can have the quality of a jagged tear -- instead of simple inability to use words, I may get a few words out but something will be seriously wrong with them, then suddenly without warning there are no more words and a lot of pain.)

Ticcing may increase a lot. (Note:  My movement disorder sometimes gets in the way of this.)

A strange perception may happen. As if I am shrinking down very small and moving far away from what is happening outside of me. Which includes my body since I feel it as external. This seems especially common when my movement disorder  turns a meltdown into a shutdown:  I will feel the screaming and flailing almost reaching the status of true movement and falling short. Then I get that weird sensation like I'm shrinking and falling down further and further from everything around me. My senses get dulled, too. Or at least my inner response to them does. 

About senses, I've noticed that shutdown can either seem to dull or heighten them. And these cam be more the reaction to what's sensed, or they can seemingly be the sense itself. Whatever the reason though the effect is similar. 

Sometimes they can even seem to be dulled and heightened at once. Like it will feel as if every sensation is sluggishly crawling in from a distance, and "darkened" somehow (obviously only a visual example). But at the same time, once it gets there, it can be excruciating. m

Sometimes all I can do is sit there and blink over and over. Not random blinking but deliberate measured blinking over the same time interval each time. This can convince people I'm having a seizure but I'm not. 

Some of my weirdest motor shutdowns have had elements of what I suspect involved seizures or more probably migraines. When these happen, one side of my body goes painfully rigid and the other side goes completely limp. Divided straight down the middle.

Something can happen where I feel more or dless normal, but when I am around people, they all whiz by likef a tape on fast forward. Interaction is difficult to impossible because by the time I figure out what to say in response to someone, they are gone or onto another topic. I can often appear catatonic when this is happening despite lacking a subjective feeling of slowness or motor issues. Sometimes I spend all day like that sitting in one spot, because it takes so long to think. 

And... WOW. This has been speculated before. It took me forever to hunt down this paper on the Internet archive:

Time, Mirrors and Autism. It speculates on a link between time sense, catatonia, and autism. I need to save a copy of that paper because time works just like that for me a lot. 

Anyway. 

So vision is my least reliable sense to use and my first to induce massive levels of overload. During shutdown it takes very little visual input to overload me. Looking at my pillow is overloading even though it's a soothing shade of solid dark blue. The problem is the stitches. There's too many of them. The number of stitches HURTS. I eventually usually find that wearing an eye mask (even while not lying down) is the only possible way to function. Otherwise the amount of visual input is paralyzing. It feels violent like some huge force is slamming into me every time I see anything at all no matter how plain or simple it seems to anyone else. 

Words can have that punch-in-the-head effect too whether spoken or written. It's common for me to get stuck in between ability to read normally and total inability to recognize words. One of the worst in-between states is when perceiving a word tries to call the symbol or language processing part of my mind. It knows to call it up and where it is. But it's not there. And it's absent in the most painful way possible. Sort of like if the skin next to your fingernail is absent and something presses on it and it hurts. Only much more painful. So language likewise feels like some kind of assault. 

A really bizarre form of sensory assault happens after one of those periods of not perceiving things. It seems a backlog builds up. So I go lie down eventually. Dark room. Won't be disturbed. Then it happens:  Every piece of sensory data that didn't get through, attacks. It comes out and it feels as if it's happening again. Except my skin will feel horribly painful and brittle. But everything else the same. There is no way out but through and no way to think clearly enough to try to get out. After it's over things go blissfully dark and silent for awhile. Then I come back to my body and usually find I'm lying down somewhere drooling all over the place. 

And of course there's often a very healthy urge to hibernate. 

As usual I'm sure there's more but this is all I've got for now. 

When I've tried to look up the "being unable to move" thing, I found an account somewhere by a schizophrenic woman who described something very similar to this. I can't seem to find the link again, but one thing she talked about was this kind of shift in time. She'd be in the hospital trying to scratch her nose, and a nurse would return her arm to a resting position because it took so long to move and no one understood what her movements meant. Obviously, schizophrenic catatonia is different in a lot of ways from autistic catatonia and shutdowns, but that was fresh in my mind (even though I can't find it again).



The bolded parts sound familiar to me, but I don't have a lot of specific memories. I did have a five day migraine in November, during which looking at any number of things was quite painful and overwhelming. But that was a migraine (and some gastrointestinal issues and massive amounts of brain zaps - I wasn't sick, no idea what was going on), and I definitely had language. It is probably where some of that comes from.

The closest to the feeling of being physically punched by sensory impressions lately is sometimes I can get overstimulated on the computer but not bring myself to take a break, and little things like IM alerts are painful, partly because I can't ignore their annoying flashiness. I don't think of that as shutdown, more an increasingly fragmented degree of focus and a general inability to exert a lot of control over focus. This can help push me toward shutdown (or a meltdown, which generally pushes me toward a shutdown anyway because I don't really do outright meltdowns so much anymore), and at the very least trigger bad headaches by itself. It contributes or is contributed to by a lot of the excessive noise that also pushes me toward shutdown. At some point, more and more senses become more sensitive as my state of mind/stress gets worse.

Also another was being exceptionally sensitive to sunlight, and feeling sunlight on my body like almost emotional (not physical) blows - the feeling made me upset (but not like meltdown upset). This happened on a drive to the store the other day, and - since we took a freeway - made driving by trees rather shocking. This kind of thing is one reason I prefer to stay indoors during daylight hours. I'm not sure this qualifies as a shutdown, either. I'm not sure what it is.

Reading your list (and that article I linked earlier) I am wondering how many shutdowns I experienced that I didn't know how to categorize. I've had times when I got really rigid and managed to pick stupid arguments, as an example, although I have no idea if I was having a kind of shutdown. Some of these seem like, they could happen to me and I would have no way to categorize them at all. And I think I described some of them in the "do you think in words" thread:



But they seem pretty short - and my other shutdowns tend to be longer. On the other hand I could be doing this in my room and not really notice as much if I do it around people (I actually had it happen around people earlier today and realized what I saw in retrospect, and I was seriously feeling like I was due for a shutdown as it was).

Anyway, I don't mean I've experienced most of the shutdowns you describe. It's more, how many things have I experienced that I wrote off as something else, that were actually shutdowns?

Also, since I started this thread, I've noticed a couple different things:

Speech shutdown - I lose speech, but not anything else. I can maybe force myself to say a word or two, but they're kind of stilted, but mostly I don't want to/can't talk. Not that these were new, but before they'd start before/after the more complete shutdown.

Edit: This paragraph removed because it was just my atypical depression symptoms starting up again.